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Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the provocatively named Wonderlic Test? Thought so. I hadn’t heard of it either. Turns out, it’s used by every NFL team to determine not strength, not speed, not toughness – all standard measures of football prowess – but smarts.

LSU Tiger, now Dallas Cowboy, cornerback Morris Claiborne (no relation to Liz) made headlines yesterday not only because he was picked a prestigious 6th in the NFL Draft, but because he reportedly scored a 4 (out of a possible 50) on the Wonderlic Test. This may not matter to you, especially if you don’t care about sports. But it should.

Readers of this column know that I have long called for a college competency test before one receives a diploma. In England's university system -- where I enrolled for my Junior Year Abroad from Northwestern (alma mater of Wonderlic Test creator, E.F. Wonderlic) -- you must pass a battery of tests before graduation. We do the same with most U.S. public high schools (the Regents exams are well known to New York City high schoolers). Why don’t we do the same with U.S. colleges and universities? Especially with studies showing that students actually grow dumber after several years of college.

As Mr. Obama jets around the country pandering for youth votes by promising budget-busting free or low-cost tuition, even as the $1 trillion student loan bubble prepares to pop, shouldn’t we at least expect universities that are gorging on taxpayer-funded Title IV aid to monitor whether a student is learning anything besides football? If Mr. Claiborne had such a severe learning disability, as some have suggested, how did he even gain admittance to LSU? Moreover, how did he pass a midterm exam while enrolled there?

It prompts one to ask what kind of systemic academic corruption must exist inside Les Miles’ LSU football empire for a player of this caliber to end up so cognitively ill-equipped for the adult world. Doesn’t a student-athlete who clearly helped the university rake in millions of dollars in fan and TV dollars deserve better?

I am scheduled to interview Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal later this spring. Mr. Jindal has been positively heroic in transforming education and workfare in Louisiana after the Hurricane Katrina debacle. However, the Claiborne case is a prominent blemish on the state’s otherwise stellar education efforts. It needs to be investigated. What were Claiborne’s high school grades? What were his collegiate grades? What were his SAT scores? Let’s see those papers he had to write in high school and college. Let’s see that SAT essay. Let’s hear from student aides on whether Claiborne actually wrote his college papers or took his college exams.

If you think playing professional sports is only about what you do on the field, the court, the course, or the pitch, think again. One’s “sports IQ,” or in Claiborne’s case, one’s “football IQ,” is only one piece of a much larger equation. As I made clear in my post on Allen Iverson's financial travails, all sorts of intelligences are required to be a total success as a professional athlete, and not just during one’s playing days. Those intelligences include emotional intelligence, financial intelligence, the intelligence required to fully grasp and negotiate a contract, the intelligence needed to have a meaningful life after your playing days are over, as well as the intelligence to make the right decisions on and off the field.

Even if Claiborne “blew off” the Wonderlic test, as he now claims, it suggests a person with a questionable character IQ, if nothing else. Not that such failings matter to the gaudy, micromanaging owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones, who didn’t seem to care about these other intelligences when he drafted the LSU standout. Ironically, legendary Cowboys coach, Tom Landry, was the first NFL coach to use the Wonderlic Test to predict player performance.

From all reports, Mr. Claiborne seems like a decent, good-natured, and hard-working young man. Nevertheless, we should be concerned when athletes lack basic competency in any measure of intelligence. When we fail to act, let alone care, it sends precisely the wrong message to academically at-risk kids who idolize players just like Morris Lee Claiborne.

Think the Wonderlic Test is unfair, racist, or too rigorous? Take a sample test here, and let me know what you think below. Moreover, feel free to track me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, and follow me on Forbes to receive regular dispatches from the front lines of global education. I am also launching email newsletters on Education, Politics, Culture, and Travel. In addition to summaries and article links, Crotty Newsletter subscribers will receive breaking and market-making news before anyone else. My "Crotty on Education" newsletter, in particular, will include links to videos and podcasts by experts in the field, high-level research reports, plus the invaluable Crotty on Education Stock Index. You can subscribe to Crotty Newsletters here: www.jamescrotty.com/newsletter.html